Conventional pilings or piles are elongated members that are made of steel and typically have C-shaped, I-shaped, square or round cross sections and are driven straight down into the ground by repeated impacts with an impact or vibratory hammer repeatedly pounding their top ends. The purpose of these conventional pilings is to later connect equipment and structures thereto. Many different buildings and structures are anchored to the ground with pilings. Such structures may include solar panels, racking, and/or trackers that need to be connected to the ground so that the equipment and structures do not fly away or get destroyed by the wind.
Conventional piles suffer from several disadvantages, including at least the following: (a) piles are quite heavy (to withstand the impact force hitting their top ends) and long and are thus difficult and expensive to transport to and around a job site; (b) pile driving machinery is expensive and slow to drive each pile into the ground, which increases labor costs; (c) driving piles creates noise that can be problematic or be a nuisance; (d) piles are typically difficult to install in the optimal location due to the brute force nature of how they are installed; and (e) piles use more steel than needed to achieve their intended purpose (due to their vertical orientation and their method of installation), thereby increasing cost relative to a more optimized system. Alternatives to conventional driven piles include ground screws, which are expensive to manufacture and frequently require an expensive pre-drilling operation due to the volume of material displaced by the screw. Helical anchors may also be used, but these only work in a limited number of soil types due to poor moment resistance. In the particular case of piling systems for large ground-mounted solar arrays, where a typical job can utilize many thousands of piles, conventional systems are especially problematic due to the extremely large number of piles used on such jobs. Even a small savings in materials and labor per pile is meaningful.
Therefore, what is instead desired is a new system of installing piles that overcomes the above disadvantages of conventional piles. Ideally, such a new system would provide a solid structural foundation using shorter and more lightweight piles, and the piles would be installed in a faster, quieter and cheaper way. As will be shown, the present system overcomes these disadvantages.